Despicable Donald—And The Multiple Philadelphias

Philadelphia is “The City of Brotherly Love.”

Philadelphia is the venue of the 2016 Democratic National Convention where Hillary Clinton has been nominated. Philadelphia, Mississippi, is the rural pesthole where local cops murdered and the KKK buried civil rights workers Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman during Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. Philly Miss. is also where Despicable Donald sent his eldest son during the week of this year’s Democratic Convention to tell the Nashoba County Fair that he favors retaining the Confederate Flag on the Mississippi State Flag as a matter of “tradition.”

Also this week, I just was reminded of something watching The History Channel. Late in the Civil War, Confederate POW Camp Andersonville, where half the Union prisoners died and Swiss-born Commandant Henry Wirz was later executed as a war criminal (the Nuremberg defendants cited his defense of “just following orders”), a main reason for the lethal conditions, as well as for the lesser horrors at Union prisoner of war camps for Southern POWS, was that President Lincoln and General Grant felt morally compelled to halt transfer of captured POWS with the South, only after the Confederates refused to transfer black Union troops and their white officers, threatening instead to reenslave or hang them.

Watching the Democratic Convention in our historic Philly, Despicable Donald mused that Mrs. Khan, the Gold Star mother of a slain Iraqi Army veteran, was silenced from speaking with her husband because she was a Muslim. She has demurred in a press Conference and Washington Post op ed, explaining that she was just too heart sick to speak.

Now, an even more despicable creature in a right-wing news rag has denounced Hillary for not memorializing the slain Captain Khan back in 2004 when he was slain, and has equated Trump’s demeaning of Mrs. Khan and her religion with 2004 criticisms of mother of slain soldier Cyndy Sheehan for speaking up against George W. Bush. Talk about vicious non-sequiturs. By the way, George W. Bush never criticized Cindy Sheehan.

Bernie Sanders and now Trump has called the American presidential election system “rigged.” They are too kind. The best you can say about it this year is that it is “nutty” for nominating the likes of Despicable Donald.

And yet Trump could conceivably be elected president—given a stroke of God or the Devil. I saw again this week Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Love the Bomb (1964): and I retched rather than laughed.